Monthly Archives: June 2008

Figuring Out Facebook.

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Facebook and My Space offer what’s called “social networking”. These two services are, I think, the largest of the social networking entities, but there are others, some of which deal with specialized sub-groups, such as scientists. Facebook and My Space have attracted the attentions of social scientists and anthropologists, because they seem to offer ideal natural laboratories in which to observe how humans structure their interactions and relationships. From the technical point of view however, running these services presents a serious logistical challenge, since the number of subscribers is very large…in the millions…and the amounts of data these people want to present and exchange is considerable. The subscribers also have definite ideas about how quickly all this should work. Technology Review
has an instructive article detailing “under the hood” aspects of one of the prime social networks, Facebook. The story surveys the computing power and data storage requirements of the system and provides an explanation of how it all works. Face
While you there, take a look at two other articles that also discuss aspects of social networking. One asks who owns the data on these networks, which is a very good question, and the other is a discussion of the business aspects involved, including some wondering about whether they can make any money.

The Web Prefigured?

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“Nothin’ say luvin’ like somethng in the oven”, as the old commercial went, and nothing says modern like the Web. Right? What could be more modern? What could be more divorced from, well, say, early 20th centurgy Belgium, with starched collars all around and inkwells, and touch typists and file clerks padding quietly around immense card catalogs? Well, hold on a second. Today’s New York Times has a long, a really long, story in the Science section on the work of one man who, after having been largely overlooked or even forgotten, is the subject of considerable attention, as a person who thought about, figured out and implemented a number of the features we think only came into being with the advent of the Web.

The man in question was Paul Otlet and the small Belgian city of Mons is home to an archive and museum which is planned to memorialize his work. Otlet was the son of intelligent parents, who “homeschooled” their child, in the conviction that ordinary schooling stifled intelligence and creativity. Their main teaching tool was the family library, and Otlet got the bug, spending the rest of his life hanging around libraries, a fact that obviously makes him our kind of guy. Otlet’s work foreshadowed innovations such as hyperlinks, but added a feature to make them “intelligent” in some sense. He planned a colossal network (reseau), in which searchers would make use of what he called “electronic telescopes”, something like our computers, to look for and retrieve information from all over the world on all sort of topics. And he got it going too. Belgium was interested in becoming the seat of the League of Nations, and Otlet pitched tihe idea of his world brain to the Government. Figuring that it would strengthen their bid, the politicians supported the idea and quite an operation was launched, reviewing thousands of documents and generating millions of index cards. He even started a fee for service answering branch. People could write or telegraph requests for information and the team in Mons would try to locate materials on the topic. Answers were copied from the originals and sent to the requestors. When Belgium lost out on the the League headquarters bid, the government lost interest also, and dropped the funding. The Depression came along, and then WWII, with the German occupation. A great deal of the materials gathered were destroyed when the Nazis grabbed the building as a site for an exhibition of “Aryan art”. Otlet died in 1944, well before anything like the computers his schemed called for were available. But his descriptions and sketches seem to have caputured pretty much all the theoretical basis that his “reseau” would need to function when the available technology came along.
I can’t include a link to the story, since it won’t work for most of our readers. But Look in the Times for 6.17 and hunt this down. It’s worth the effort. On the Times site, there are also some graphics and a video that help explain what the guy was up to.

PS: There is a link to the Otley story via Scitech Daily Review;
Otley

Tipping the Hat to Mr. Joyce.

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Today is Bloom’s Day. June 16, 1904 is the day on which the events recounted in James Joyce’s pathbreaking novel Ulysses take place in Dublin. And, in honor of the great Irish writer’s great creation, celebrations of Bloom’s Day, great and little, take place all over. In some cities, there is a marathon reading of Ulysses, which would be a real work-out. In other places, there are modifications, in which various key portions of the novel are read aloud, or even dramaized. There is a foot race in Spokane and celebrations in Szombathely,a town in Hungary, since that was the place in which the father of one of the main characters in the book, Leopold Bloom, was supposed to have been born. On the one hand, I don’t imagine too many of the racers and revellers have actually read the book. On the other hand, what a great excuse for a party! So, go someplace, have a drink, toast the Shade of Ireland’s greatest novelist, and relax a bit. It’s hot.
PS. Here’s a post from the Public Library of Science (PLoS) blog on Bloom’s Day:
Bloom

A Random Walk.

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It’s time for for the Blogging Grouch to lead the Troop on another stroll through the woods, to see what’s new in there. We live in odd times, for sure. But, interesting things, or at least ideas about interesting things, keep popping up, and a lot of those things pertain to what we want to do in this blog. so here goes:
The June 12 issue of Nature has a couple of items on transformational or translational research. One piece talks about the reaction by NIH to comments on its proposed new peer review process. An interesting aspect of this reform is the effort to fund “blue sky” but high pay-off projects. And David Goldston in A Delicate Balance decrypts some of the buzzwords being used in the effort to get more product out of NIH’s research investment, and get it faster. The distinction between “translational” and “transformative” is one key notion. Declan Butler, one of Nature’s senior editors, offers a backgrounder on the gap between the NIH research effort, generally considered to be first rate, and the arrival of the breakthtrough therapies that many feel should be pouring out of the labs and into the clinics. If you can only read one of these, read Butler, but by all means read them all if possible. Things are changing and those old horses who are used to treading the same path that worked well for their funding in the past may be in for a rude shock when renewals are due.
Balance
Peer
Butler

One of the canons of scientific policy is that you cannot direct basic research. Science progresses best when investigator pursue the objects of their own curiosity without any attempt to make something tangible or useful come directly out of the research. A problem yields when the scientific basis for the solution emerges, often out of quite surprising sources. I think NIH would be unwilling to say they are trying to “direct” research, but it sure looks that way, at leat a little, around the edges. Who can blame them? Tens of millions of Americans are heading into retirement and the prospect of keeping up with their care, if all that can be offered them is more of what we have now, is very daunting. So, get a move on, and start producing those cures. We’ll see what happens.
Let’s flit over to Boston so that we can get straightened out on the true meaning of The Butterfly Effect. Peter Dizikes, the author, claims that the BE has become a staple of popular culture, which is fine, excep for the fact that it’s usually misunderstood by the people who are talking about it. The true meaning of BE centers on the difficulty of prediciting outcomes when the initial conditions are uncertain. But, most folk talk about BE to mean that great effects can be result from small causes. Well, yeah. A dead Archduke causes WWI? No, not at all. But, we have been BE’ing around for a while now, and it’s good to be put right.
Butter
Technology Review has some good summaries of what’s going on in the world of Busines IT. That’s a little rubbery, and even vague, the “business IT” part I mean. Something that developed with a business slant to it might turn out to be generally useful, but I digress. There are capsules describing new ways of archiving email, making computer centers run more efficiently, chip architecture, image search, and on one man’s view that the Artificial Intelligence effort is floundering rather badly because what it want’s to do is impossible, so it’s time for a rethink.
Artificial
If you’ve ever wondered about Stonehenge, and who hasn’t, there are two new books that will try to set you straight. I guess the quick answer is nobody knows and that it will be bloody hard to prove. The reviews are in The Telegraph:
Stones
We’ll do one more and then head back to camp for the night.Antonio Melechi has written a good overview of the Victorian era’s fascination with hypnotists, mediums and similar creatures in: Servants of the Supernatural: the Night Side of the Victorian Mind. It’s an oft-told tale. The Great Nineteenth century saw stupendous advances in understanding of the material world, and in turning that understanding into something like Baconian mastery of it. But the other side of the coin was a tremendous growth in phonus-bolonus metaphysico-myterioso movements, cults and organizations which seemed to push in exactly the opposite direction. The Grouch does not doubt that these phenonmena are related, but will leave the unpacking of the relationship to nimbler minds. OK that’s it. Inside and lights out.
Boo!